somehow yes. it feels lik now - im not fueling som evil company anymor, but the peeps mekin the OS components n the community <3

Oh my gosh, the "abusive partner" comparison resonates so hard. I was helping a friend out with their laptop recently, part of which involved reinstalling Windows. Even in the initial configuration stages (before the stress of updates and resetting settings), I was incredibly skeeved out by the process.

"Do you want to turn on $thing? [Yes / Ask me later]"

I was surprised by how genuinely gross I felt to be clicking "Ask me later". The next screen didn't help matters

"Do you want to turn on $more_bullshit? [Yes / Not now]?"

"No." is a complete sentence, but it's apparently not one that Windows understands. Or perhaps it understands it all too well, because I expect that this coercive strategy works to push this bullshit onto some of the people who try to opt out.

The whole process was genuinely stressful, and I could feel that stress in the tightness of my chest by the end of it. At first, I felt silly that this had felt so invasive and weird (especially given that this form of asking for "consent" is everywhere nowadays), but my friend said that it made sense to them if we consider how tightly entwined our lives are with technology nowadays. I am not my body, but the degree to which I inhabit it is why bodily autonomy matters so much. Similarly, I am not my computer, but I spend so much time there that it does sort of function as an extension of me — it's no wonder we take psychic damage from the kind of bullshit Windows pulls

Everytime you bought a notebook.

TL;DR: This is a somewhat meandering tangent that doesn't necessarily have a point to make, but your interesting comment evoked these thoughts in me, so I figured you might find these interesting

I am not a vegetarian or vegan (yet?), but I have many friends who are, and it's cool how that changes the dynamic. My vegan friends tell me that being the only vegan at a barbecue usually sucks, because there are rarely good options provided by non-vegan hosts. In contrast, when I am the only non-vegetarian/vegan in the group, it becomes trivial, if not optimal to choose non-animal food products, and it's always striking to me how refreshing that feels.

For example, if everyone orders 3 tapas-style dishes and shares freely with the rest of the table, then I am able to experience more options if I opt for vegetarian/vegan dishes — if all three of my choices contained meat, then it would be pretty impolite to expect the rest of the table to share their food freely with me given they can't have any of mine. A more balanced path would be to get one meat-containing dish that was just for me, and two dishes that could go towards tapas socialism for the table, but this falls flat if I don't enjoy the meat dish as much as I expect, because that leads to either wasting good food, or eating something I'm not keen on. In contexts where most/all of my dining partners are vegetarian or vegan, it is easier to for me to go with the flow. The ease of this (especially with respect to the reduction in guilt that you describe) is a large part of why moving to being vegetarian is one of my horizon goals.

Another example is a Jewish friend who often explains her dietary requirements as "basically just vegetarian", because that's more straightforward than explaining kosher requirements to non-Jews — especially given that my friend is comfortable eating some things that other Jews might not consider to be kosher, and these nuances aren't something you can explain to someone who's just trying to plan food for everyone. If my home is full of vegetarian food, then my friend, who is like a reincarnated gannet who hates food waste, can swoop in and hoover up all my expired and mostly edible food when they visit. And it's easier to avoid getting to the stage where food should be thrown away if I can share it with vegetarian or vegan friends, so this is another way in which reducing animal products in my lifestyle is a boon rather than an inconvenience.

I tell these mini stories because your comment caused me to reflect on how dependent hassle is on the external context. The way this links to Linux is that one of the things that caused me to switch was that Linux is pretty common in scientific computing, especially high performance stuff. A lot of software works with both Linux and Windows, but I kept finding issues that only arose on Windows versions, or poorer documentation on the Windows side of things. I felt an implicit pressure to switch to Linux, because that specific context and community made me feel like the odd one out. The science stuff didn't require switching to Linux on my personal PC, but I figured that making that leap would help me to really feel comfortable with the scientific aspects (somewhat analogous to how I have made a concerted effort to learn how to cook food from cuisines that are less reliant on animal products/meat, because it's a useful strategy to become a more skilled cook).

I wear crocs not socks. My autism and tight fabric do not mix.

Yes. One of those days I'm going to post a pic of myself to !unixsocks wearing my jeans and work boots, just because I feel left out.

(I mean technically, yes, I'd be wearing my usual Costco wool-blend hiking crew socks under them, but that's not what you mean, LOL.)

i mean a significant percentage of linux users are autistic, and a significant amount of autistic people HATE socks. i don't hate them but i go barefoot so i have no use for socks.

I don't, but I've worn long underwear due to sitting still in a cool office for hours on end... at a Linux terminal. The thigh-high socks are starting to make a lot more sense now.

Or non-binary.

Only if you have a script that arbitrarily selects your distro for that session.

today I learned that I am a tgirl. I didn't expect to find out this way but I'll accept it.

Where does fedora fall on this?

by making connections between personal experiences and seeking patterns and similarities between them.

being trans and using linux have some things in common (a lot of things have things in common with other things), for example, they're both related to self-discovery (albeit to different levels).

some things (actions) get difficult because most people don't use linux, but everything that's harder about using linux is completely tiny in comparison to how pleasant it is to not use windows

some things (ex. cloths fitting) are harder because most people don't have the body I have, but despite that every negative thing about being trans is tiny in comparison to how amazing it is to not be a man

(adapted to fit my situation, 'anonymous Ubuntu tboy' is the opposite from me)

Lemmy

I guess it doesn't stretch that far

Your comment is interesting to me because I had a completely different read on the meme. The tumblr tboy compared using Linux to "being transgender", so read "using Windows" as being analogous to being cisgender (i.e. identifying as the gender you were assigned at birth). I get why you opted to think of this in terms of gender presentation though, because how does one map "being [transgender/cisgender]" onto "choosing to use [Linux/Windows]". Indeed, I was confused by this too, at first, but after a moment of pondering, I found a fun interpretation from thinking of "using Linux" as the thing that's not the choice.

Ubuntu tboy seems to consider using Windows to be an innately bad experience, and whilst he didn't explicitly suggest this is true for everyone, it's useful to look at this through that lens. If "Using windows" = universally bad, then that would suggest that "being cis" = universally bad. That sounds ridiculous and is quite an inflammatory statement on its face, but it's not necessarily attacking cis people, but the concept of cis-ness (or assigned gender at birth) itself. In other words, "existing in a world where Windows is treated as the default option sucks because loads of people hate Windows, but may not even realise that an alternative exists, or switching is (or perceived to be) too difficult".

At this point, it's probably useful to situate my perspective here: I am cis, and I've found that I feel most free and empowered as a woman in spaces that are super queer — i.e. the kinds of spaces where I forget the construct of gender entirely, or it is thrown into sharp relief and I see the absurdity of the system now.

To bring this back to the Windows comparison, I remember that when I was dual-booting, I had problems with my computer's system time because Windows assumes your hardware clock (the one you can set in BIOS) to be your local time, whereas Linux (and MacOS) assumes that to be UTC. It would make more sense if Windows could switch over, but that's not practical in part for the same reasons why they used local time in the first place: backwards compatibility . Of course, Linux has its own inherited contexts, conventions and traditions, but Windows feels far more caged in by the past because of its status as the default. But rather like cis-ness, I wonder what the world could look like if there wasn't such a hegemonic default option. What might it look like if even people who weren't "computer people" could be empowered to do cool stuff with their computer? Is that even possible? It's hard to say, because a world without such a default is highly speculative, but I don't need to be about to visualise specifics of that to complain about how the assumed default is harmful to more people than realise it.